Our Story

Our story is not that unique. It is probably more typical for a lot of people who become experts in their field. You identify inefficiencies in the "way we've always done it", no one questioning the status quo, and everyone 'just going with the flow' expecting different results. Until one day...

Born out of frustration at the high level of failure of Business and Digital Transformation projects and programmes Heath was bought into rescue, Technology Architects and Technology Architecture hiding away in the ivory tower developing enterprise solutions (Technology AND Business?!) for the Business without engaging or consultation with the Business, a so called industry body and 500 page manual written by 300+ Technology Architects and office managers masquerading as Business Architects, Business Process or Enterprise Application software management tools peddled as Business Architecture and Business Transformation application software (but not Business Architecture or Business Transformation at all), and still a 70% failure rate of transformation projects, enough was enough.

After 15 years of consulting directly to end clients, including 2-years on the ‘other’ side working via a consultancy agency, and after 9-months on an assignment, Heaths contract was unexpectedly terminated, given just 2-days’, then on the last, sitting in a programme board meeting that someone clearly forget he was still on the meeting invite to attend, his ‘opposing’ lead presented to the board the “new programme approach” – a complete rip off, word-for-word of the work Heath done some 9-months earlier, presented to and signed off by the same board. Despite being approved and although this ‘opposing’ lead thought it was great, Heath was told “it wouldn’t work”, to which he questioned “why?”. The response was “you can’t use the text book here”, to which he said “you will have to show me this text book, I am not aware of such text book? This is 15-years experience, 4.5-years MBA, plus your guys contributed to it, this is a group effort, I am merely presenting”.

Now, someone was clearly not expecting Heath to be in this meeting, to witness himself what unfolded. A true professional, Heath had no intention of leaving early and adamant to work to the end, making sure everything he had worked on was properly handed over. It was after all, a £250M budget programme, it was no small task.

Having accumulated over a decade-and-a-half of experience and education including his MBA, TOGAF® Practitioner certified Enterprise Architect, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Certified Scrum Master (to name a few) as well as working for some of the biggest financial institutions, government agencies and alongside some of the biggest consultancies in the world, and now having his contract unexpectedly terminated but not for ‘underperforming’ but clearly ‘overperforming’, and watching his own work replayed back to him, as their own, he thought, now is the time to fully venture out on his own.

When that happened (and no less, for a second time), Heath teamed with his good friend Syed, a former MBA buddy, to do what the pair had been ‘kicking the idea around about starting something together’, that now is the time to “just do it”.

Syed, an Enterprise Architect, founder of several successful start-ups including a market leading eLearning platform, set off to change the industry for the better. Noticing the markets lack understanding of Business Architecture, and having a strong available capability to develop a eLearning platform, Heath, as an active and passionate member of the Business Architecture industry body set off to their European conference, to pitch the idea of being their eLearning provider to go with their certification programme they only just released.

At the conference, Heath observed not only was there a lack of eLearning providers (there was none, and no preferred provider programme, it was yet to be established), but the self-proclaimed “market leading” tools that were being pedalled to the conference participants by the software vendors outside the conference rooms where not only so complicated and technical, they were really re-purposed technical development tools masquerading as Business Architecture tools, and were not fit-for-purpose.

These tools were so complicated that Heath, later obtaining a downloadable trial version crashed one of them so hard that support couldn’t fix it, that they arranged a 3-way conference call with the two founders who they themselves couldn’t reverse engineer the problem to understand the root cause.

What astounded Heath, was first, there are no Business Architects in that company, they are Technical Architects (if that, and they built it for themselves), and second – he was not even trying to do anything sexy, he was just trying to do his day-to-day job?!

It was clear, this so-called market leading software was actually out-dated, over complicated, desk-based (you needed a CD to download and install it, and this in the 21st century!) with exorbitant lump sum upfront annual payments (we live in the world of SaaS and low-cost subscription models now), that clearly it wasn’t fit-for-purpose, Heath returned to London and suggested to Syed a pivot from developing an eLearning platform to teach the framework Heath has been using for the last 10-years to rescue those programmes he is called into rescue, to developing Software to allow Users to use and implement it daily online.

With 90% of a book written exposing the underhand issues within the management consulting industry, the pair agreed to share the writing and changed the focus of the book from a ‘City-Boy’ style tell-all, to writing what Heath did on a day-to-day basis, and develop the training, software and partnership programme to licence practitioners to use the HOBA® framework and materials.

The book – The Business Transformation Playbook® – How to Implement Your Organisations Target Operating Model (TOM) and Achieve a Zero Percent Failure Rate’ has just gone live on Amazon and reached #1 bestseller in Project Management; Decision-Making & Problem-Solving; and #2 in Consulting, received over 40 reviews and has an amazing 5-star rating!

Consulting, Coaching and Workshops will now start to be scheduled, with the eLearning programme to follow shortly after, then HOBA Pro® SaaS and HOBA® Partner Programme for Certified HOBA® Practitioners, licenced to use HOBA® materials and train others.

‘Be the standard for Business Transformation in the world, providing teams and organisations the tools to implement their target operating models and transforming their business, reducing waste and change debt and realising more benefits on a global scale’,

and improve the reputation and understanding of the value of Business Architecture (and Business Architects – we call Business Transformators®) as ‘essential to strategically respond to massively disruptive business and technology change’, and